Leslie John Martin

Martin emigrated to the United States in the late 1940's after serving in the British Eighth Army in Egypt, Iraq, Belgium and Germany during World War II.

He was born in Budapest in 1921. His Hungarian mother returned home to have the baby from Vienna where the family was living at the time. The family emigrated four years later to Jerusalem, where he grew up in the 1920's and 1930's. Palestine was under British rule at that time under a League of Nations mandate. Martin eventually worked in Jerusalem as a stringer for the London Daily Herald and as an editor or subeditor for the Palestine Illustrated News and Palestine Post (renamed the Jerusalem Post in 1950) and in Baghdad for the Iraq Times.

The family left Palestine via Haifa on a British troop ship for London as Israel was being born and lived in London before dispersing to Canada and Bermuda. Martin moved initially to Oregon to pursue graduate studies at the University of Oregon. He had earned his undergraduate degree at the American University in Cairo in 1947. He relocated in 1949 to Minnesota where he earned a master's degree in 1951 and Ph.D. in 1955 at the University of Minnesota.

One day in 1950, he took a seat in a graduate seminar next to a young undergraduate, Lois Henze, in the back row just as exam results were being distributed and asked her what she had gotten on the test. She got an A+ compared to his own A-. He said he knew he had to meet her. They became inseparable and were married in 1951. They were married for 67 years until her death in October 2018. (She went on to become an associate superintendent of schools in Montgomery County, Maryland and head of Maryland Governor Donald Schaefer's commission on excellence in schools.) She called him her boyfriend to the end. They sat in front of a small television set in the kitchen many nights in later years holding hands.

Martin worked on the copy desk for the Minneapolis Tribune during graduate school and as night editor for the Detroit Free Press in the mid-1950's. He taught journalism at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and the University of Florida in Gainesville, before moving in 1961 to take a position as chief of the Near East and South Asia division and eventually as head of research for the US Information Agency during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. USIA was responsible for press officers, libraries and educational programs at US embassies and for the Voice of America.

Martin left USIA in 1969 after Richard Nixon was elected to teach journalism at the University of Maryland, where he was head of graduate studies and for a period acting dean of the College of Journalism. After retiring in the late 1980's, he served as faculty ombudsperson and continued serving as faculty adviser to a number of Ph.D. candidates.

His lifelong interests were government uses of propaganda, the mass media and public opinion research.

His book, International Propaganda: Its Legal and Diplomatic Control published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1958 and republished online by Cambridge University in 2013, won an award from the Society of Professional Journalists (then called Sigma Delta Chi).

He remained interested in learning throughout life, taking courses in Arabic, higher mathematics and computers, and wrote haiku and poetry. He was on Facebook late in life so that he could keep in touch with his grandchildren.

He never missed an opportunity to tell his sons he loved them, he said, after not hearing that enough from his own father.

He is survived by two sons, Keith in Chevy Chase and Brian in Sandy Springs, Maryland, three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.